Open Stack

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-05-31 at 09:08 -0400, Monty Taylor wrote:
>> I mean, I've watched Debian try to get things done over the
>> years, and it's a comical expression of exactly how JFDI such a thing
>> winds up being.
>>
>> We aren't talking about 20 people here. If we were, sure. We're talking
>> about over 800. The mailing list is a TERRIBLE way to discover
>> consensus, and in the history of OpenStack it has never one time worked.
>> The mailing list is a great way to uncover points of view.
> 
> Voting isn't exactly an awesome way of uncovering consensus either ...
> but it does gets a decision made. The risk is that you rush to a vote
> too early on something and it gets through by a narrow margin even
> though you could have built a better consensus.
> 
> My point about the mailing list was that TC meetings shouldn't be where
> the considered and thoughtful happens ... because a mailing list
> discussion gives people a better chance to actually think about things
> and listen to each other.

I certainly agree with that. That's why in the TC charter we encoded the
need for public discussion on topics on which the TC is called to vote
(at least 4 days on a -dev ML thread).

Personally I think that's a reasonable trade-off. The issue is discussed
in the open, we can see what the general consensus is (if any), see if
more discussion is needed before we can make a decision, discover who
deeply cares about an issue (and invite them to the TC meeting to
represent that opinion)...

If the issue is obviously creating issues (like our first try at the TC
membership evolution discussion under the time pressure of Spring
election organization), we can (and we did) decide to push it back
rather than rush a vote on it. But for those cases when we need a
decision made *now* we have a mechanism is place that enables us to do that.

This mechanism is clearly working well, so I see no need to fix it. What
we need to fix is the future composition of the TC membership now that
we doubled the number of "projects" and we want to establish a number of
"programs".

-- 
Thierry Carrez